Kissing the 2008 Cab S. good-bye

Well, it was just hanging fire.  About three months ago the seal on the 100 liter tank of the 2008 Long Island Cab S. got cranky and was loosing pressure every day or two and I finally decided to just let it go.  The grapes were too low a brix in the first place, we chapitalized some, we fussed and we hemmed and we hawed and we never got to where we wanted to be.    This morning I just threw in the towel, setting aside 2 gallons of the oxidized wine / vinegar to boil down into a reeducation we might use for cooking, and kissing the rest good-bye.  It's gone, the tank cleaned and dismantled.  There's still 5 or 10 gallons of the un-chapitalized wine in car boys.  Onward and upward.

Here's a pic of a gallon of the wine, reduced to about a quart and a half.  Not thick yet.  I'm aiming for syrup.

2nd 2011 Muscat bottling

Mike came over and we bottled another couple cases of the Muscat.  I think this is the first Mike's tasted the finished wine.  I'm very happy with it.  More floral and more complex than the prior two years.  I think the effort we put into keeping the fermentation temperature down and then getting it topped off early really paid off.  (Or were the grapes just better than the prior two years?  No!  It's all about us!)

I went back and looked at some of the March bottling.  Some bottles have a fine sediment, some don't.  One bottle that I've kept very cold for the entire intervening time has bitartrate crystals that settled out, but that's no surprise.

We'll be using the Muscat to start the Honey, I Shrunk the Puttanesca party next week.  Hello, summer.